


Her Laugh

by mindthetarget



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Clint Barton Made a Different Call, Deaf Clint Barton, Developing Relationship, F/M, Hawkguy, Natasha Romanov Joins SHIELD, Past Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov, Prank Wars, Pranks and Practical Jokes, SHIELD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-10
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-08 15:08:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4309929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindthetarget/pseuds/mindthetarget
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompted by a <a href="http://widowbitesandhearingaids.tumblr.com/post/123055378187/give-me-a-natasha-thats-brand-new-at-shield-and">tumblr post</a> by <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/widowbitesandhearingaids">widowbitesandhearingaids</a>.</p><p>Clint Barton brought a rogue element to SHIELD. Nobody really wants her there and she isn’t sure she should be there either. But she’s there now, and it’s his fault, so he’s engaging her the best way he knows how: with as many pranks and bad jokes as possible. If she doesn’t kill him first, he’s going to teach this deadly, lonely girl to laugh—and just maybe he’s going to fall in love with her laugh too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. First, Bad Ideas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [widowbitesandhearingaids](https://archiveofourown.org/users/widowbitesandhearingaids/gifts).



“You know, I think you have a thing for strays,” Phil says.

Good old Phil. Phil Funny Man Coulson. Man with the words. Yup. Agent Phil Coulson with the freaking tiny powdered donuts in his suit jacket pocket when he showed up in Nederland, Colorado, two years ago, instead of pizza. Clint had asked for pizza. Phil had brought him  _shrunken donuts_.

Sure, he’d eaten the donuts, but what else was he supposed to do? He was sitting up in sticky, icy pine trees all day and all night for ages and he had to rely on the agents below to feed him because they wanted eyes in the sky at all hours while they waited for the villain to take the bait at the Frozen Dead Guy festival—and apparently he wasn’t allowed to call a pizza delivery guy up a tree. Phil had just grinned and said, in that soft-spoken and yet I’m-so-funny way of his, “You owe me twenty bucks.”

Clint still isn’t sure why  _miniature freaking donuts_  cost him twenty dollars.

Now, here he is, and Agent Coulson still thinks he’s so funny, saying Clint has a thing for strays.

“She’s not a dog,” he rebukes his handler. Clint usually would come up with a clever quip, show Phil who the real funny guy around here is, but he’s tired and his nose has been bleeding for thirteen hours, and he feels very defensive about this.

‘She’ is the redheaded, death-eyed girl being wheeled down the hall by a bunch of S.H.I.E.L.D. fellas, strapped to the wheelchair Clint ‘borrowed’ when he stole her from the hospital in Germany. She had been unconscious then, but she was conscious now, had been for a few hours, which was why he’d gotten maybe a little overzealous with the duct tape. But man! She's scary when she's pissed! Using an entire roll of duct tape had seemed like a really good idea at the time. Like,  _really_  good idea. Now it just looks bad, like he’s never tied somebody up before; it’s definitely going to rip out some of her hair when they remove it. It’s not the first time Clint has had a bad idea though, so everyone here should be used to it by now, other than her.

“This means a much longer debrief,” Coulson notes now.

“As long as there’s donuts.” Clint grins, proud that he’s finally gotten to use that. He’s been waiting.

“You still owe me twenty dollars.”

Shit. Didn’t think that through. “I’m good for it,” Clint grumbles. “Just...”  _Shit_ , what costs money, what’s his excuse?  _Quick, Barton, think._  “Rent?”

Coulson smiles that maddening little polite smile of his and leaves Clint behind as he strolls on after the girl in the wheelchair. “Agent Hill will debrief you, Barton.”

“Wait, no, I need to come with. I told her I’d bring her in and—”

“Barton, we’ve got this. Go to debrief.”

Clint sees the girl cast him a look as the wheelchair turns a corner. He thinks she might still kill him, duct tape be damned. After the requisite second or so contemplating his inevitable demise, he shrugs and heads for debriefing—it won’t be the first time a pretty girl tries to kill him. Probably won’t be the last.

* * *

 

He’s in a lot of trouble.

He knows he’s in a lot of trouble for two reasons.

One: Maria Hill has a red sharpie. He’s seen what she uses that red sharpie for on files; people usually get gone when Hill breaks out the red sharpie. He likes Hill, likes her by-the-book tactical brain and her loyalty and that she never seems to doubt herself at all; he’s pretty sure Maria Hill is going to get another big promotion someday soon. But he hates that sharpie. He stares at the marker when she sets it down on the table between them, while she’s scooting her chair into place, willing it to disappear. Red fudging dang sharpie...

And two: Just as Commander Hill is uncapping the evil red sharpie, the door opens again and the freaking Director, freaking one-and-only-one-eye Nicholas Clint-Is-Screwed Fury, walks in.

“You,” Fury starts before Clint can stand all the way up. Clint sits back down. No point running, Hill’s already started the red sharpie in on a piece of paper. He’s done for. Fury continues, “are a pain in my damn ass, Barton.”

“Yes, sir,” Clint agrees. It seems smart to agree with the people with red sharpies and one eye while he’s stuck in that room with them.

Over the next four hours he’s questioned, berated, and questioned again several times over. Commander Hill does most of the questioning, and Director Fury does most of the berating. It’s scary when they switch roles now and then, and he usually chooses those moments to just keep his mouth shut and nod nod nod nod.

Clint deeply regrets not getting coffee before he came to debrief. That was dumb. What’s that, bad idea number five-zillion for the day?

He was supposed to kill her. S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn’t kill people, that’s not what they do, he’s heard it a thousand times, but you don’t pull a sharpshooter in on a solo mission and hand them a file marked in red to go deliver roses. He was sent to kill that girl.

She’s bad. She’s so  _so_  bad. She’s killed more people in her very young life than Clint has picked pockets and, oh man, has Clint picked a lot of pockets. She’s Russian, and a ghost they had all of one or two pictures of (not even good ones) until he brought her in today, and she has done things that would give Clint nightmares, and she’s got skills that can give him more.

Only, when it was all said and done and he caught up to her after a week of them nearly killing each other around corners and through windows, she’d looked so...mishandled. Yeah. That’s what it was. Mishandled. She’d reminded Clint of those pit bulls on the TV shows, the ones that had been made to fight and kill for entertainment, that were  _abused_  but didn’t know it because that was all they had ever known. They didn’t know they weren’t supposed to be killers, didn’t know not to tear people’s faces off, didn’t know they could be any other way. They didn’t know that their masters were shit-stains and should never have been allowed near a dog. All they knew was what they were taught to know.

This girl, this Black Widow, all she had been taught to know was to be bad, be a killer, be the reddest file Clint Barton has ever seen at S.H.I.E.L.D., and that’s not her damn fault. He wouldn’t shoot a pit bull between the eyes for being abused. He’s sure as hell not going to start shooting  _people_  for it either.

 _Aw, man. Coulson’s right_ , he realizes. He has a thing for strays.

At least his nose has finally stopped bleeding.


	2. Ledgers

This is the second hospital bed she has occupied in the last twenty-four hours. The first, in Germany, had been by her own choice. She had played the victim well when picked up by paramedics, giving a false name and believable story for why she had two broken ribs, a fractured clavicle, an arrow broken off in her calf, and two bullet wounds in her left arm and side, plus innumerable bruises and cuts, and a car that was totaled in a shopfront. It was a simple tale to weave: she got caught in the crossfire between a carnie and a couple of thugs having some kind of turf war and crashed her car.

The best lie was the truth. Well. Truth peppered heavily with omission and interpretation.

The facts of reality were more...complicated.

It began with working a task in Germany for herself, stealing the ledger of a local crook, because she wanted the names and serial numbers recorded in it in order to track down some ghosts in her head. Those serial numbers could help her hack her way into equipment that would lead her to shadowy people who could lead her to even shadowier people who wanted her dead. She could kill them first.

Only, before Natasha had even gotten to the ledger, along came the boy scout. He operated in a decidedly un-boy scout-like way that made her wonder if he too was the product of others’ less than legal enterprises, a flavor of underworld in his methods. She had known he was there the moment he started to reconnoiter her movements through Germany, and she had shot him promptly in that first hour. Unfortunately, he was wearing kevlar, she supposed, and he reappeared the next day and shot at her first. The bullet had missed, but he’d made his point by ruining her cover at the time.

For a week, she had played cat and mouse with the thorn in her side. He shot at her, she shot at him. She aimed for the head after the first time and the kevlar, but he had wizened up too and managed to dodge or keep on the move too much for her to make a hit. Twice, they were in the same room and set to murder one another, but both times unaware outside parties got in the way and they had been forced to disappear themselves. Once, he had actually grazed her with a bullet fired from some distant rooftop, and it had pissed her off not because of the bit of sting or blood, but because she was tired.

She was tired of being on her toes, of the hairs on the back of her neck standing up because she knew someone was watching her, aiming at her. She resented this stranger who was dogging her days and muddying her waters for adding to the weight of her weariness. She wanted him dead, wanted everyone dead, so she could have some  _peace_.

That wasn’t fair. She may have wanted the boy scout dead, but she did not wish death on everyone. She was trying to turn things around, trying to find a sense of self that wasn’t based in senseless, unquestioning assassination and accessory to murder. The transition was difficult and plagued with the ingrained awareness that to kill and dispose of an obstacle was far more efficient than to let it live. In his case, she had not overcome that awareness.

Despite his interference, she had finally gotten the damn ledger and was ready to get the hell out of town, when she opened the door and...there he was. He must not have been expecting her to still be in the room anymore than she was expecting him to be outside it, because for a heartbeat they had both looked at each other without full recognition of what was happening.

Then she had launched at him, disarmed him of his guns, and smashed his head into an IN CASE OF FIRE box hard enough to send him careening to the floor. He’d come back up faster than anticipated, lunging at her and crushing her into a filing cabinet that had been the cause of the fractured clavicle. He’d kept up with her for a minute or so as they exchanged blows and she tried to shoot him, until she had at last succeeded in putting a bullet through his shoulder with his own gun. That was when she’d realized that guns weren’t the only thing she should have taken off of him, because while he was howling and cussing her out, still skidding down the hall from the kick she’d given to get him off of her, he’d swung something from a black case on his back and  _shot her with an arrow in the leg_.

She’d been so surprised. An arrow? Really? But surprise wasn’t going to keep her from killing him. He’d been aiming for her chest, and only missed because she was a hairline faster and leapt and whirled away. So he  _was_  going to die. Finally.

Cue the thugs, who had heard all the commotion and come for the intruders at last, and Natasha had put the bullet meant for the boy scout’s head through a German skinhead’s instead. The Germans were shooting indiscriminately, not taking the time to figure out these two were not in cahoots, and so it had become a case of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my ally.’ Or at least ‘the guy I am getting shot at with can help me shoot the guys shooting at us.’

Natasha did not give him his guns back, but it wasn’t necessary. He turned out to be quite proficient with that compact bow and arrows. She broke the shaft off of the arrow in her leg because the head was dug in and she needed it out of her way, and the two of them had fought their way out of that hallway and to the streets. They had fought their way through two blocks of thuggery, to the car Natasha had waiting, and she’d tried to leave him behind then, but he had ended up standing on the hood of her car anyway while she drove, shooting at their pursuers over the roof of the car for four more blocks with his sticks-and-string idea of a weapon. By then, she had discarded the guns for lack of remaining ammunition, so it was acceptable to have him cover their retreat. She could still kill him when they were in the clear.

She could not say for certain what had crashed the car. It hadn’t been her driving, because even with bullet wounds and broken bones and a  _damn arrow in her leg_ , she was steady. Maybe one of the thugs shot out her tire?  _Why_  didn’t matter, really, only that she had indeed crashed into the side of a hardware store. The archer on the hood of the car was thrown violently when the car first lost traction; she saw him fly and hit a light pole. Bye bye, little boy scout birdie.

After the crash, Natasha was pinned. She was stuck in that car while bystanders called for help. No thugs came along to retrieve their ledger, so she assumed they were either all taken out or avoiding the rapid emergency response presence. No boy scout came along, so she assumed his flight into that light pole had taken care of him too. She was hurt, and she needed medical attention, so she morphed into a victim and let herself be taken in for help.

Then he had appeared in her hospital room before dawn the next morning while she was still recovering from the drugs that had come with surgery. She had sensed his presence and opened her eyes already knowing she was in trouble.

“Wow,” he had said, standing there with an arrow aimed at her chest. “You look worse than I do.” Which was saying something, because he had a hospital wristband on too, there was a cast on his arm, and his face was a modern artwork of bruises, stitches, and bandages. There were bits of gauze stuffed up his nose; he must still have been bleeding from the break she’d inflicted in their scuffle. He still wore a hospital gown over pants she assumed must be stolen, and was barefoot. Funny that he would put reclaiming his silly bow and quiver before acquiring an appropriate wardrobe.

Those observations aside, she was out of it. She was furious. She was trapped by her own body and the drugs and a boy scout with a bow and arrow.

She was so  _tired_.

She had waited for him to loose the arrow, never breaking eye contact, glowering and mad. So damn mad. Because she had tried, she truly had, to get away from a life she was not sure was real anymore, only to find herself up against the feeling of not knowing what life was at all. She was up against a wall of blood, of vengeance owed her often by people she did not even know, and every time she got a foothold in the wall to climb over it, bricks came loose covered in more blood, and loneliness, and the growing certainty that she was not enough.

Natasha was not going to get over that wall alone, she knew now, but there was no one to hold a ladder for her. There never would be.

And now some American—she could identify him as such by now—asshole was going to knock her permanently back into the wet red earth below her wall. With a bow and arrow.

Natasha had lifted her chin, baring her throat, but executing him with her gaze.

He had lowered the arrow.

What followed was confusing, because Natasha was still rather high at the time, but he had asked her why she was alone and she had actually answered, for some reason. “They made me that way,” she’d said. “That is how I was made. That is how I will die.” Looking back now, she thought that the only way to describe his face on hearing her words was...hurt.

Then he’d said something about it not having to be that way. About taking her somewhere. About being... _better_.

She tried to break his wrist when he left and came back with something and moved to inject it in her IV line. She wasn’t up to par though and he’d managed it, and away she had slipped into nothing.

She had woken on a carrier plane of some kind. Military, emptied out. Sitting in a wheelchair that was tied to the side of the plane. She was handcuffed to the chair. The boy scout had been there, watching her from across the way.

“Hi,” he said, as if this was a casual way to meet someone for the first time. “I’m Clint. Clint Barton. What do you want me to call you?”

In the time it took him to ask, she had escaped the handcuffs. She then did her best to lunge out of that wheelchair and kill him, but drugs and injuries still gave him the upper hand, as did the assistance of another man wearing tactical gear. That was when Barton had started with the duct tape.

They had to cut her hair to get it off.

* * *

 

Natasha breathes slowly in and slowly out, through her nose, because her lips are still raw from the duct tape. For the last four hours, she has been strapped to this hospital bed, and they’re standing there talking about her like she’s not even here. She is waiting for her moment.

They are not military, they are not government, they are not a private company. She evaluates that they are, in fact, the group called S.H.I.E.L.D. which she has undermined a time or few in the past, before her attempt to become a solo act. 

They are very good at their jobs. She is better.

When a man with a soft, approachable, but somewhat bureaucratic facade approaches her bedside at last, she has again escaped her bonds. As he begins to say, “Hi. I’m Agent Coul—” she moves quickly, intent on grabbing his gun and escaping.

She is furious and surprised when her body fails her and she almost falls to the floor at his feet. As she is swiftly returned to the bed by armed guards and medical staff once more, the agent begins again, “Right, let’s try this again. I’m Agent Coulson. You didn’t think we would really fall for that twice, did you? Barton told us about how quickly you got out of the handcuffs on the plane. Very impressive. But so are drug cocktails.”

Natasha growls and looks away.

“You should understand, first, that while Agent Barton definitely has the best intentions—he’s got some kind of moral complex—bringing you here, it isn’t a guarantee this is really the place for you. We know that, and I’m pretty sure you know that too. We know you’re...were? Are? In-between? An assassin for lingering factions of the Soviet Union with...I guess we can call them issues. Lots of drama. Lot of self-serving politics, if you ask me.”

The way he talks is a little witty, somehow, as if the smile he wears the entire time is entirely genuine. It unnerves her.

“Point being, you’ve caused us a lot of grief over the years and having you here is probably not going to work out. Unless you want it to. Do you?”

She’s startled. The question, the offer of her own opinion, is not at all what she would expect from American undercover divisions that have tried to kill her and now abducted her. She looks at the man with a new measure of scrutiny, trying to weigh just how genuine that smile truly is. His smile is real, she decides now, but it is not without secrets.

“Do you want to be here?” he asks again.

She lets the word fall from her lips with care. “No.”

“Why is that? We’re actually pretty awesome, and so are you. Seems meant to be.”

What, is he  _serious_? This is the strangest interrogation she has ever endured.

“I operate alone,” she says, again measuring each word and observing every microsecond of response.

He smiles a fraction wider and steps aside as a nurse moves to fiddle with one of the machines Natasha is hooked into. “Do you? For the last year or so, it looks like you’ve tried to. Having you here has finally given us a chance to get a proper scan of your biometrics, so we’re finding a lot of footage now. But before that, you were  _their_  operative. What changed?”

Natasha is silent. Again, she remembers that she is tired. Again, she remembers that she is alone, and weary, and doomed. And irredeemable.

He doesn’t seem to actually require an answer from her. “I think,” he says, and she can tell he is not just saying so; he is actually contemplating her position with a great deal of seriousness and...perhaps an attempt at empathy, “what changed is you. You’re trying to become something new, strike out on your own. It looks like you’re evolving ethically.” He holds up a thick, thick folder. She does not have to see the contents to know what it holds and why he is referencing it. “You have been very busy for the last year.”

She has been busy her entire life. It is endless, the work of a spy, be she under orders or on her own.

“From what I’ve seen, you’re not too sure what it is you’re doing though,” Agent Coulson goes on. “But there’s the groundwork there for going straight. You’ve tried to leave a lot less damage in your wake, hurt a few less of the little guys. Is that what you want to change? To go straight?”

What is straight? She isn’t entirely certain. She left, extracted herself, because she  _wasn’t_  certain anymore. She only knows that one day she looked around herself and realized maybe what she was told was not the entire truth of it. All those years she had believed herself a tool for the good of something greater, not so much a person, and that had been acceptable as long as she trusted blindly in those putting the tool to work. Which she had...and she isn’t entirely sure of why that is either. She had no reasons, no logic, only the deafening thought that she had to trust them and do as she was told.

Leaving had made that thought all the louder for a very long time. It still echoes fiercely every time she closes her eyes or moves in her self-interests first. But she needs to know why the thought is there, because some part of her whispers that if she does not know, then she has no proof that anything is real.

 _Wanting_  her life to be real is, in and of itself, the greatest personal awareness Natasha has experienced thus far.

Agent Coulson seems to see the war of thoughts behind her eyes, no matter how carefully Natasha endeavors to maintain a perpetually cold gaze. “I think you don’t know yet,” he says. “Let me tell you what we can offer. If you come to work for us, you’ll still be a spy and maybe sometimes other things too. But you’ll be in charge of yourself as a person. You’ll be our agent and we’ll expect you to follow orders, but you’ll have your own agency, your own faculty of decision, in how you let those orders fill in the spaces of your ledger. We’re offering a chance to put some good things on your record, or get out of the game, or at least discuss some possibilities. I think that’s what you really want, isn’t it? To decide for yourself who you are?”

Ledger, he calls it. The book of her life, line after line of cost and profit, all written in crimson and sin. It is heavy with the number of its pages and with the saturation of blood that inks it. The metaphor is apt, she thinks, when she sees the past year as her desire to burn those pages, erase them, do  _something_  to lessen the burden of it she carries with her.

The concept of agency, of putting to use the tool that is herself but with some new option of autonomy at the same time, is also important. She has been struggling with that, with the idea of how to be something of her own being while still being of service—she  _needs_  to be of service. Consent and self-determination, however, have never before appeared to align with that desire.

The room is silent. It is just her, the medical equipment, and Agent Coulson now. She lets the silence fill her for a minute, then two, then three. She thinks about the wall she cannot climb. Is this the ladder she thought would never be held for her?

He is patient, and still standing there watching her with that oddly real little smile of secrets, when ten minutes have passed and Natasha looks to him with a slow blink.

“...keep talking,” she invites.

There is no guarantee this is real or will work. But she is going to try.

**Author's Note:**

>   1. Also posted on [tumblr](http://mindthetarget.tumblr.com/tagged/her-laugh-chapters). 
>   2. Yes, the Frozen Dead Guy festival really is a thing, up in Nederland, Colorado, a mountain town. It celebrates the discovery of a cryonic state corpse in a Tuff Shed with such delightful pastimes as coffin races, polar plunges, a “slow motion” parade, and “Frozen Dead Guy” lookalike contests. I spent a lot of time in Nederland as a kid; there’s lots of nice perches for a Hawkeye, but you can bet his snarky little butt was pretty close to frozen dead guy too! 
>   3. The donuts are a nod to my personal headcanon that _A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to Thor’s Hammer_ was a result of Coulson’s ongoing, subtle game of messing with a hungry, nest-bound Clint Barton. 
>   4. All credit for this idea goes to widowbitesandhearingaids! Thank you for allowing me to go wild on this prompt. 
>   5. This story will be told from both Clint and Natasha’s POV. I’m not sure how long it will be, but I’m guessing between 5k and 10k words right now. I’ll post more this weekend. 
>   6. Thank you as always for your kindness! 
> 



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